Hugo shrugged. ‘No problems, really. Well, that Stella got a bit hysterical, but they talked her down. I think they’re going for what Mrs Watkins suggested.’
‘Which is what? I’d left by then.’
‘Well, I’m not really…’
Hugo was about nineteen, lean like his dad, gelled dark hair and an earring. He looked at Merrily.
‘Mr Devereaux,’ she said, ‘are you saying you had a spy in the vestry all the time?’
‘Dad’s the worst kind of control freak,’ Hugo said.
‘Local intelligence is very important,’ Devereaux said. ‘You live in a village, Merrily, you know what it’s like. They weren’t going to say much with me there, were they? Too official.’ He smiled. ‘No, I exaggerate. Hugo was at the back already, doing the lights.’
He put out his cigarette in a fizzing of sparks against the church wall.
‘Tell me what you’re proposing,’ he said.
‘Well… it’s a requiem service in the church. A holy communion for the dead. So that would be a service for the two people who… died in the accident.’
‘Why them?’
‘Because they’re dead. It’s a big thing, death, but funerals today are often cursory and don’t bring… don’t always bring down the curtain. Don’t bring peace, or even the promise of peace, for the living.’
‘And how would this service achieve that?’
‘Mr Devereaux, we could sit down and I could give you the theology in depth and take up the rest of your night. Let’s just say that it does.’
‘You’re very confident.’
‘I’m not confident at all. That is, it’s not self -confidence, it’s…’
She raised her gaze to the darkening sky. Preston Devereaux laughed.
‘Well… who am I to argue with that? All right, then, go ahead. It’s your show now. This is just a straightforward service, I take it?’
‘Inasmuch as any service is straightforward.’
‘What I mean is, you wouldn’t be conducting what the press could call an exorcism?’
‘You’re right, I wouldn’t.’
‘Because none of us wants silly publicity, and if you can deal with it for us in a discreet and dignified fashion we’d be most grateful to you. Discuss it with the Rector, I should. I think you’ll find he agrees.’
‘Really.’
‘Nice to talk, Merrily. Goodnight to you.’
Preston Devereaux clapped a hand on his son’s back and they walked away to a dark 4x4 parked in front of Merrily’s Volvo. She watched them go, feeling faintly sick. A bat sailed in front of the church lamp like a blown leaf.
Deal with it for us. Coming out of the church she’d felt halfway in control again, now she was a puppet with strings so tangled you couldn’t tell who was pulling them. Merrily heard the voices of the villagers emerging from the church and walked rapidly away along the roadside towards the vicarage.
A car pulled alongside.
‘You all right, Merrily?’
Bliss’s face at the car window. She’d actually forgotten all about Bliss and his incident. She pulled back in mid-stride.
‘Is this going to improve my night, Frannie?’
‘Quite honestly,’ Bliss said, ‘I’d say probably not.’
22
Power of Place
Merrily jerked her head away. ‘ Oh God…’
The DC, who was called Henry, pulled back his lamp.
‘You could’ve waited over by the truck,’ Bliss said. ‘I did warn you.’
And maybe she would have hung back, but a call a few minutes ago from Lol to say that he’d found Jane had fortified her, made her feel obliged to go across to join Bliss and what lay, in its abattoir splatter, across the jutting shelf of stone.
Bliss had driven up to the car park opposite the Malvern Hills Hotel at the foot of the Beacon, where they’d got into Henry’s police 4x4. A roundabout route along dirt tracks had taken them to the other side of the hill, Henry parking in some woodland before leading them by lamplight, like a shepherd, along an uphill mud footpath.
It had brought them to a wide-mouthed cave in a wall of rocks, like a black gable under a roof. Two uniformed policemen were in the opening, smoking cigarettes. Incident room, Bliss had said, and laughed.
Merrily swallowed. Being sick wouldn’t help the forensics.
‘Frannie?’
‘Uh?’
‘You think there’s a chance he did this to himself?’
The Home Office pathologist, Dr McEwen, looked at Bliss, probably to check that it was OK to speak in front of the woman in the dog collar. Bliss nodded.
‘I’d say the chances that your man did this to himself are fairly remote.’ McEwen was a soft-voiced Irishman in a red and blue baseball cap. ‘With a suicide – if we assume this is something the individual has never attempted before – he’s usually unsure of the best place to go in, so you’ll normally find two or three test cuts above and below the main wound. Now, if you see here…’
This time Merrily didn’t look, turning away towards the few lights of somewhere in Worcestershire laid out like a broken necklace under the ochre-streaked charcoal sky.
‘But there is more than one cut.’ Bliss’s fluorescent orange hiking jacket creaking as he bent down.
‘Sure, but they’re not what anybody would call test cuts,’ McEwen said. ‘This one here looks like knife-skid, but this one, arguably a secondary slash, is far too deep. See what it’s done to the trachea and the muscle there? There’s also a wound on the back of the head, which might… Look, give me a few minutes more, all right?’
‘Are these wounds consistent with that knife?’
‘Back of the head, though, that looks more like your blunt instrument. I haven’t seen the knife – you got it there?’
‘Bagged up,’ Bliss said. ‘Kitchen knife, eight-inch blade. Found in the grass not far from his right hand.’
‘Assume he didn’t do it to himself. And I’d guess you’re looking for more than one person, Francis. Probably more than two. If it happened here, which is how it looks by the blood-spatter, then… a muscular young feller like this, he’d take some holding down, wouldn’t he?’
‘Maybe somebody else holding his head back by the hair over the top of the stone to expose his throat for the knife. Henry, what did you say about this stone?’
‘Known locally as the Sacrificial Stone, boss. That’s all I can tell you.’
‘There you go, Merrily. Can’t say fairer than that.’ Bliss took her arm and led her away, back up towards the cave. ‘And this is Midsummer’s Eve, right? Talk me through this.’
‘Through what?’
‘Ritual sacrifice. Just to get me started.’
‘ That ’s why you wanted me to come up with you?’
‘No doubt we’ll find a proper expert tomorrow, if we need one. But as you’re here… fair to say your personal experience extends to aspects of pagan worship?’
Merrily glanced back at the stone, a steep wedge in the hillside, the dead man, with his black bib of gore, arching back over it like he’d been been using it for working out, about to perform some dynamic form of sit- up.
‘Frannie…’ She dug both hands hard into her jacket pockets, turned away to where the path wound around to the earthen ramparts of the Iron Age fort. ‘It doesn’t happen, does it?’
